Creativity and Culture. All rights in film images are reserved by the filmmakers. Words are my own.
Josh Safdie's new film, Marty Supreme, is a choppy and kinetic ride that showcases Timothée Chalamet's acting talent across 150 minutes. Chalamet plays Marty, a wiry New York shoe salesman with dreams of conquering the world through table tennis. This is in part a sports drama, but this being a Safdie film, it is also a… Continue reading Film Review | Marty Supreme
Eddie Huang, former Vice employee, is bitter. This is evident throughout Vice Is Broke a documentary from an insider's perspective. In it, Huang recounts his experiences rising to fame on his own accord (through word-of-mouth popularity of his cooking in dotcom era New York, and subsequently getting absorbed into Vice. For the uninitiated, Vice was a grassroots… Continue reading Film Review | Vice Is Broke
Mike Leigh's Hard Truths is several things, but it is most obviously a family-centric drama that focuses on several related people in their middle class lives in London. At its centre is Pansy, played by Marianne Jean-Baptiste. She is a fraught, complex character that obsessed over cleanliness and acts with anger towards her quiet husband and socially… Continue reading Film Review | Hard Truths
Everything comes together in A Complete Unknown; a finely crafted and reverent portrait of Bob Dylan, one of the 1960s’ undisputed icons of music. More than Dylan himself, the film explores the culture and times of New York City in the midst of the twentieth century, with all its upheaval and changing times. It portrays folk… Continue reading Film Review | A Complete Unknown
Beauty standards are a palpable topic for exploring, particularly when they're about women in image-obsessed Hollywood. This is the setting for Coralie Fargeat's The Substance, a satirical and grotesque body horror that serves up its own version of warped feminism. The film focuses on Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore), an ageing TV fitness instructor who was revered… Continue reading Film Review | The Substance
Social realism by way of eighties Helsinki; Shadows in Paradise is early, yet masterful Aki Kaurismäki. The film follows Nikander, a garbage collector, as he goes about his day-to-day life, which is as dull as you might expect. He works in a two-man team (under his superior), traveling the city and taking in the trash. By night,… Continue reading Film Review | Shadows in Paradise
Vampire's Kiss is the ultimate Nicolas Cage film, and a bizarre, surreal and hilarious horror-comedy. It's a film about a yuppie; Peter Loew (Cage) in late eighties New York City, single and rich, and mentally unhinged. His time is divided between working as an executive in his literary agency, nights on the town, and trips to… Continue reading Film Review | Vampire’s Kiss
Oppenheimer is Christopher Nolan as you'd expect. Big, boisterous, and loud; and in terms of scale, you can't get much grander than the atomic bomb. In that sense, Oppenheimer is Nolan to the nth degree. He's always been about creating larger-than-life cinema, even to the detriment of logic in his screenplays. This film follows the formula and then some.… Continue reading Film Review | Oppenheimer
Dev Patel's directorial debut, Monkey Man, is a brutal, bloody and unrelenting revenge thriller from the streets of India. The film follows our protagonist, played by Patel and unnamed other than in the film's title, who takes part in violent and seedy underground fights for cash. He is representative of India's underclass, with a willingness to… Continue reading Film Review | Monkey Man
Denis Villeneuve's adaption of Dune brings with it a sense of remarkable scale and style. Riding high on the successes of Arrival and Blade Runner 2049, Dune continues Villeneuve's flair for capturing epic, otherworldly escapes. Frank Herbert's original landmark 1965 science fiction novel was, in fact, long regarded as unfilmable. A melting pot of themes, references and sociopolitical commentary, the overriding view… Continue reading Film Review | Dune [2021]
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